For All Its Success, Will ‘Avatar’ Change the Industry?

From left, Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg at work on Mr. Spielberg's “Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn,” which is due out in 2011.Credit
Andrew Cooper/Paramount Pictures

LOS ANGELES — Just five months after Warner Brothers released its talking-picture sensation “The Jazz Singer” in October 1927, the studio was back in theaters with another talkie, the crime drama “Tenderloin.”

In today’s Hollywood, things take a little longer.

Even as James Cameron’s science-fiction epic “Avatar” continues to dazzle the audience with its visual wizardry, filmmakers and studios are struggling to figure out when, if ever, viewers can expect an equally striking on-screen experience. With its combination of immersive 3-D images and a sophisticated performance-capture technology, the movie has, as of Sunday, taken in $1.3 billion in worldwide ticket sales, much of it from 3-D screens.

Asked last week if any similarly ambitious film were in the works, Alec Shapiro, senior vice-president for sales and marketing of Sony Corporation’s content creation group, whose digital cameras were used on “Avatar,” was stumped. “Not to my knowledge,” he said. “I can’t, offhand, see another half-billion-dollar production.”

Mr. Cameron and his producing partner, Jon Landau, have talked of possible sequels to “Avatar.” But 20th Century Fox, which distributed the movie and helped underwrite production and marketing costs of about $460 million, has yet to announce plans for any successor to a film that was at least 15 years in the making.

In a research report published by Barclays Capital on Wednesday, Anthony J. DiClemente and George L. Hawkey called “Avatar” an “outlier”: a unique event that leaves the business environment around it largely intact.

“While ‘Avatar’ is likely a watershed for digital and 3-D technology,” they wrote, “it does not tell us that the underlying economics of the film business have changed.”

Mr. DiClemente and Mr. Hawkey predicted that “Avatar” would be a moneymaker, though they do not expect imitators anytime soon. In a detailed financial model of the film, they estimated that Fox and its partners would see slightly more than $1 billion in pretax profit from their investment in “Avatar.”

As for cinematic technology, the achievement of “Avatar” was not so much a single leap — like the one from silent film to sound — as an integration of complex filmmaking systems that allowed Mr. Cameron to combine live actors and computer animation in a relatively seamless, and believable, blend of fantasy and the real world. Critics and audiences noted a qualitative difference between what they saw on the screen in “Avatar” and what they saw in other recent films that used 3-D or motion-capture technology.

At its core was a 3-D “virtual” camera, developed by Mr. Cameron in partnership with the effects expert Vince Pace. The camera and its rigging systems allow a director to view actors within a computer-generated virtual environment, even as they are working on a “performance-capture” set that may have little apparent relationship to what appears on the screen.

But it is not clear, for instance, that Mr. Spielberg’s use of the technology — and reliance on Weta Digital, the company made famous by Peter Jackson and that produced the effects for “Avatar” — will strike viewers in the same way as Mr. Cameron’s fantasy moon and blue aliens.

“We can’t talk about what it’s going to look like, because that process goes on for another two years, practically,” said Marvin Levy, Mr. Spielberg’s longtime spokesman.

(“A Christmas Carol” from the filmmaker Robert Zemeckis used motion capture and 3-D technology, but looked wholly different from “Avatar” and took in just $137 million in domestic theaters after Walt Disney released it in early November.)

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So far, Guillermo del Toro, who is expected to direct the first of a two-part fantasy series based on “The Hobbit” for release in 2012, has stuck with a plan to film that movie with more conventional, 2-D techniques, even though Mr. Jackson — a powerful force behind both “Avatar” and “Tintin” — is among his producers.

Executives of Warner’s New Line Cinema unit, one of the studios behind the project, have in the past said that they believed that 2-D would be well suited to the sense of intimacy they anticipated from “The Hobbit” and its fantasy universe — and nothing about “Avatar” appears to have changed that plan.

Still, some filmmakers were sufficiently inspired, or jolted, by “Avatar” to shift gears. Shortly after seeing “Avatar” last month, for instance, Bryan Singer, who in the past directed summer blockbusters like “X-Men” and “Superman Returns,” asked New Line to consider using 3-D in filming his planned fantasy “Jack the Giant Killer.” The debate continues, according to people who have been briefed on the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity because of studio policy.

Katie Martin Kelley, a spokeswoman for Paramount, said that studio had made no decision about whether its planned “Transformers” and “Star Trek” sequels would make the leap to 3-D, possibly giving the audience another sampling of the kind of immersive world devised by Mr. Cameron.

Michael Bay, whose third “Transformers” film is set for release in July of next year, declined to be interviewed about his plans.

J. J. Abrams, who is developing another “Star Trek” film to be shot in the next couple of years, also declined to be interviewed about his plans for that franchise. But Paramount executives have already begun debating whether to shoot the next film in 3-D, even if that increases the cost and production difficulty, according to one person who was briefed on the talks but spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment.

Asked whether he would consider making a movie on the scale of “Avatar,” Brad Grey, the chairman of Paramount, said in an interview in early December, “With a lot of sleepless nights, I guess I would.”

But the “Transformers” and “Star Trek” sequels are at least a year and a half away. And a new “Spider-Man” episode is not due until 2012, now that Sony Pictures has canceled a planned fourth installment from the director Sam Raimi and the star Tobey Maguire, choosing instead to focus on a reinvention of the series, with a new director and cast.

That leaves a long stretch during which moviegoers, tantalized by “Avatar,” will be watching fantasy films like “Iron Man 2” from Marvel Entertainment and Paramount or “Jonah Hex” from Warner and Legendary Pictures, neither of which is as technologically ambitious as Mr. Cameron’s recent film.

Speaking by telephone last week, Mr. Landau said the “Avatar” innovations were perfectly suited to prospective projects like “Battle Angel,” a film that is based on a Japanese comic and that has been in development for Mr. Cameron to direct at Fox.

While he and Mr. Cameron have not settled on their next project, Mr. Landau said he believed a new, “Avatar”-like film could now be made in no more than the two years or so it takes to produce many effects-driven films, and for no more expense.

Asked how quickly the next such movie might arrive, Mr. Landau said, “I hope sooner, rather than later, and not just from us.”

Correction: January 14, 2010

An article on Wednesday about the effect some of the technologies used to make the film “Avatar” might have on future movies, including “The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn,” erroneously included a studio among those releasing that film. It will be released by Paramount Pictures and Sony Pictures, but not in conjunction with DreamWorks. (Steven Spielberg of DreamWorks is the director.)

A version of this article appears in print on January 13, 2010, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: For All Its Success, Will ‘Avatar’ Change the Industry?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe